Today’s travellers are more discerning than ever before and demand a lot from their hotels and accommodations when it comes to connectivity and telecommunication solutions. In fact, mobile services and 24/7 connectivity are not just a nice-to-haves, they’ve become one of the top expectations that guests have and cite as a major driver of their satisfaction.

While email is still alive and well as the primary means of communications in the professional world, businesses are embracing video conferencing for online collaboration. It is quickly becoming a communications standard as audio and video quality improves, higher connectivity speeds are the norm and technology costs continue to fall.

Many companies these days now have teams and offices spread out across multiple locations and regardless of their size and industry, share a common challenge: how to maintain fast, secure and reliable communications and connections where their dispersed people are.

In today’s hyper-connected and competitive market, more businesses are turning to virtual phone systems to stay relevant and optimize their operations and enhance communications. If you’ve outgrown your traditional wired business phone system and want to make a change, it’s time to consider switching to a virtual phone system.

Even though email, instant messaging and social media have become the norm in our highly connected work environments and accepted modes of professional communication, phones are still one of the most significant, effective and personal forms of business communication.

From database and hardware issues to software malfunctions, IT failure and downtime can be anything from a short stint to longer periods, but no matter what, it effectively shuts down your business.

Downtime is an accepted part of doing business but the ramifications of it are wide-ranging including lost revenue but also loss in productivity among your employees, not to mention, potential long-term damage to your company’s reputation.

Just look at some of the big brands that were all hit by recent data breaches in recent years — Target, Sony, Yahoo, Home Depot, JP Morgan — and it appears that cyber-attacks are an increasing threat to all businesses as the severity and frequency of these events are all over the map. The cost of a breach extends beyond downtime and profits lost; it can also negatively affect your company’s brand and customer loyalty. 

With cloud services and advanced business systems, it has never been easier and more practical and profitable for businesses to promote telecommuting than it is right now. Virtual teams and remote workers are becoming the norm for some companies and according to 2011 data from Statistics Canada, 11.2 per cent of staff work from home for as little as 8 hours a week. And that number is on the rise as recent reports estimate that by 2016, 43 per cent of employees will be teleworkers.

In today’s modern workplace, there are countless ways to communicate: email, text, buddy, share, video chat, conference call and of course, phone. Unified Communications (UC) uses all forms of communication available to your business and integrates voice, email, instant messaging, desktop sharing and other functions into a seamless package. While it may sound more complex, UC offers you a more consistent and centralized platform to communicate and stay in touch, optimizing your business’s performance and increasing productivity among staff.